The present invention relates to an automatic teller machine, and more particularly concerns an automatic bill refilling method for a bill recycle module provided for an automatic teller machine when few bills remain in a corresponding bill box of the bill recycle module.
A money receiving and dispensing mechanism is often called a bill recycle module when the mechanism is of the type wherein the bill boxes or cases for storing the deposited bills are also used as the source of bills which are to be dispensed. A bill recycle module and an example of an automatic bill refilling method for the bill recycle module were disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,365,700 which was granted to Arimoto et al. on Dec. 28, 1982. According to the method disclosed, the operation of automatically refilling a pertinent bill box with bills of the corresponding denomination is started when the automatic teller machine for which the module is provided is in none of the modes of setting, resetting, deposit and withdrawal, and is repeated until the number of bills in the bill box reaches a prescribed value. Therefore, according to this method, interruption by the bill refilling operation of a transaction which is being executed at the time it is detected that a bill box is deficient in bills can be avoided. However, once the bill refilling operation is started, no further transaction can be executed during the course of this operation, and any users standing in line have to wait for the completion of the operation before they may execute their transactions.